Human Resource & Payroll Management Blog

It’s not easy for many people to talk about themselves at a party, let alone complete a formal analysis of themselves that will be scrutinized by their managers. Maybe it’s because it is potentially awkward that the self-evaluation portion of performance management often gets overlooked.

To make matters worse self evaluations are still viewed as something an employee undergoes—like a painful surgical procedure. It is little wonder that at companies where this is the case, the entire performance appraisal is a dreaded annual event.

Including employee self-evaluations as part of your performance appraisal process and making sure they are seen by employees in a positive light is vital to empowering your employees and creating a cohesive corporate culture. Employees are not passive participants in your workplace, so they shouldn’t be passive participants when it comes time to their annual appraisals. Giving them an active and important role to play in the performance management process is vital to their engagement in the process as well as in their day-to-day work.

A recently published article entitled Why Are Employee Self-Evaluations So Important? looks at some of the drivers and benefits of employee self-evaluations. If your organization doesn’t currently encourage employee self-evaluations, take a few minutes to take a look at it.

What do you think? Are there other benefits to employee self-evaluations? Have you encountered any challenges with them?

Part II Turnover

Terminations or turnovers can have advantages -an opportunity to add new players with innovative ideas is never a bad thing. Yet, turnover is costly. Depending on the level of skills and experience, you can expect the loss of an employee to cost the company somewhere between one and half and three times their annual salary.

Establish goals for controlling turnover in key positions. Knowing your company’s business strategies and objectives will help determine which positions will need high priority replacements when opened through turnover.

First, look inside. What programs do you have in place to develop your internal talent to step up when the opportunity presents itself? Setting up an organization development plan, including growth strategies for up and comers, can keep the intellectual property inside the organization while satisfying the career plans of top performers. Not only will this help fill critical positions quickly but it also helps retain key talent. Investing in their future is an effective, strategic investment in your business.

Use the same recruiting skills normally exercised on external talent to keep track of your internal candidates. Check on their satisfaction in the workplace. When you detect dissatisfaction or restlessness, begin marketing their talents to other managers inside your business. Although there may not be a permanent or long term growth solution, there are options for dealing with the restless spirit of your valuable human resources.

Next, identify positions where the need for creativity may mean moving people in and out on a regular basis. This creative approach to talent retention is building momentum. Taking a cue from small businesses where employees often have several job responsibilities, bigger businesses are stretching talent by expanding and diversifying job responsibilities to keep employees engaged. Maybe you have a short term opening due to a health absence, or need a special skill on a big project. Knowing your talent repository, you can identify and utilize specialized skills or interests.

These engagement tips can help you keep talented employees while controlling costs and retaining important intellectual and skills capacities.

Next time: Strategic goals in your compensation plans

For Human Resources, perhaps more than any other department in the company, the process for picking and choosing strategic goals is more complex than it may appear at first glance.

Simply put, strategic objectives are targets developed specifically to direct organizational activity, moving the business from where it is to where it wants to be within a defined timeframe. Strategic refers to the course set by the organization to be sustainable, competitive or even a future leader in your marketplace. So, when your CEO asks for HR’s strategic objectives, you will be developing measurable activities related to the organization’s future success. No small task. And how exactly do you meet this challenge when you’re the office of hiring, firing and salary management?

Hiring is a highly visible activity within the scope of your responsibilities. But, although you may have influence in this area, you may not have control. The same is less likely to be true in situations related to termination and is somewhat grayer when it comes to salary management. In short, what you do affects departments all across the board, not just Human Resources. This complicates your process; which strategies are the most strategic?

In hiring, the CEO is looking to you to keep all the departments staffed with the best candidates. Strategies in this area should be linked to identifying, hiring and retaining the best talent. And your tactics can include:

• Cultivating relationships with talent not yet on the market. Build a relationship with those folks while they aren’t on the market or even if you don’t currently have an opening, so when the time is right, you are first on their list.
• Setting your company up as the primary potential employer in your industry. To be the employer of choice includes having the managers of choice in place and building a strategy for internal talent management. When your current employees are happy they are going to tell everyone they know how much they like their workplace. Word of mouth remains your best recruiting tool. Look for more on this topic in future articles.
• Develop a wish-list of talent for specific critical positions within your company. When these positions come available you will have an immediate list of potential candidates. These candidates may be internal as well as external.

Developing a long term plan for staying on top of the changing dynamics and demographics of the workforce can be challenging. Keep your focus on the company’s strategic plan, aligning your personnel strategies with the long-term business plan.

Next time: Strategic Objectives for Handling Turnover

On December 21, 2009, President Obama signed legislation extending the COBRA premium subsidy originally established under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (“ARRA”). Under the ARRA, only individuals who were involuntarily terminated and who lost group health insurance coverage before December 31, 2009 were eligible to receive the subsidy. Moreover, the subsidy was only available for nine months of coverage.

The new legislation extends federal COBRA health coverage cost subsidies for 6 additional months for a total of 15 months of subsidized coverage. The extension applies to those COBRA beneficiaries whose nine-month premium subsidy under the ARRA had expired. The legislation also extends the qualifying event deadline to February 28, 2010. The legislation actually amends the ARRA provisions that required terminated employees to have been eligible for COBRA coverage by December 31, 2009, and now clearly says that the terminated employee only must have been terminated by December 31, 2009, even if COBRA eligibility isn’t effective until some time in 2010. Although the December 31, 2009 deadline has been amended, the result is the same: come February 28, 2010, the employees need not actually be COBRA-eligible, they just have to have been involuntarily terminated by that date.

In addition, the legislation gives beneficiaries whose subsidy expired and who didn’t continue to pay the full unsubsidized premium the opportunity to receive retroactive subsidized coverage. For example, a beneficiary whose nine months of subsidized coverage ran out November 30, 2009 and who didn’t pay the unsubsidized premium for December 2009 now has the option to pay his or her 35 percent share of December’s premium in January 2010 and, upon doing so, would receive COBRA coverage for December.

This legislation requires employers to notify current and future COBRA beneficiaries of the new 15-month premium subsidy. Additionally, it permits employers to offset future COBRA premiums or issue refund checks for beneficiaries who “overpaid” their COBRA premiums by paying unsubsidized premiums but who are now eligible for retroactive subsidized coverage.

The entire text of the legislation, including instructions for retroactive payment of premiums and notification requirements, is contained in Section 1010 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act 2010, available here.

The Bottom Line

Employers and plan administrators should notify current and future COBRA beneficiaries of the new 15-month premium subsidy, and current COBRA beneficiaries of their right to extend receipt of the subsidy. Employers should also contact their payroll administrators to determine the easiest way to offset future COBRA premiums or issue refund checks to beneficiaries that overpaid their premiums.

Not too long ago, I picked up an old, worn book my husband had purchased at a flea market. The $2.00 sticker was still affixed and, before I started reading, I could not have anticipated how much value there would be between the covers of that flea market “find.”

The book is titled “The Worlds Great Letters.” The oldest letters are an exchange between Alexander the Great and King Darius III ; the most modern letter in this 1940 publication is a letter from Thomas Mann renouncing the Hitler regime for its crimes.

In between all of these wonderfully informative and engaging letters, I found myself especially intrigued by one written by Michelangelo, in 1506, to Maestro Giulliano, Architect to the Vatican. I have thought back to this letter repeatedly, and considered how timeless its lessons are to the management of human resources.

Michelangelo’s assignment

Michelangelo had been summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II to build his tomb. The specifications that Michelangelo submitted were on a gigantic scale, calling for a three story edifice with forty major statues in bronze and marble. The Pope was demanding and politically ambitious, and the scale of the project likely seemed to Michelangelo an appropriate and necessary tribute to His Holiness’ stature.

The Pope’s head architect, however, wanted his own nephew to create the work and set about discrediting Michelangelo and “poisoning the mind” of the Pope against him. Michelangelo recounts that the Pope subsequently withheld funds necessary for the project. “…I asked him for some of the money required for the continuance of my work. His Holiness replied that I was to come back again on Monday; and I went on Monday, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, and on Thursday – as His Holiness saw. At last, on the Friday morning, I was turned out…”

Michelangelo fled to Florence, and the Pope soon summoned him, through another of his architects, to return to complete the work. In his letter Michelangelo recounts how he “lost all hope” in seeing that the Pope did not intend to fund the project, and how he feared for his life because of the politics surrounding the project. Michelangelo, in his letter, now sets the terms and conditions. “Give His Holiness to understand that if he really wishes to have this tomb erected it would be well for him not to vex me as to where the work is to be done, provided that within the agreed period of five years it will be erected in St. Peter’s, on the site he shall choose, and that it be a beautiful work, as I have promised.”

Timeless lesson to human resources management

It took three papal decrees and the threat of war against the Florentine Republic for Michelangelo to return to Rome. The project languished as, for four years, he was reassigned (to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). A year after that, Pope Julius II died. At the whim of heirs and future Popes, Michelangelo was required to change the plans five times, and the project was never completed.

In Pope Julius II, we see a “boss” who has set an expectation that his projects must be grand and self-serving. From Michelangelo’s letter, it is clear that he understood the financial requirements of the work, yet he also understood that it would take a colossal project design to satisfy the Pope’s colossal ego. How often, today, do CEOs send inadvertent signals to their workforce that those best rewarded will be those who feed the executive’s ego, rather than those who make sound, but difficult, business decisions?

We see, too, the imperative of budgeting money and time adequate to the task. Michelangelo’s anger at being fully invested in his work, without the means to complete it, is a modern day dilemma. The difference between success and failure in an enterprise is very often employees who are fully engaged in their work, and who feel supported by management. The action of Pope Julius II in withholding resources, and then restoring them; in committing to the project, then assigning Michelangelo other work; in promising commissions, but not paying them – these are the kinds of actions that, even today, will cause the best employees to “flee.”

Assessing negative information

There is a lesson for today’s managers, too, in assessing negative information brought to them by others in the organization. Undoubtedly the Pope was aware, or could have determined, that his head architect had a nephew, Raphael of Urbino, whom he wished to employ in Michelangelo’s place. With or without that information, we know that the Pope sabotaged the completion of his own project by allowing someone in his line of control to harass and alienate a high talent individual who was critical to its success.

Today, just as with this situation in the early 1500’s, an employee who is angry and embittered is likely to attempt to take control over the employment relationship. From the safety of Florence, Michelangelo agreed to complete the tomb, but on his terms. In your company, the alienated employee may engage in “take it or leave it” negotiations over commissions, take time off when it is most inconvenient for your production schedule, or regularly flaunt your dress code. Others may seek to restore personal dignity or “balance the scales’ by filing a lawsuit.

In the end, after making five changes to the project plans after Pope Julius II died and after 40 years of effort to fulfill his contract, the only visible result was a single statue of Moses. How often have you seen in your company that, when the vision is lost, the project flounders?

Whether you are an executive, a human resources professional, or a direct supervisor of employees, Michelangelo’s historical letter can offer important lessons. History makes it clear that Pope Julius II’s grand project did not fail for lack of expertise or commitment on the part of its designer and artist. For all of us who work with people, it is instructive to consider what obstacles we might be creating in our own work environments to limit the creativity and accomplishments of our own Michelangelo’s, our most talented people.

A few weeks ago our mail server went down. After we brought it back the email address was filled with spam. While we were sorting out the spam we received an email from one of our customers. Her email got lost in the spam and we missed it. About a week later we got a message from the customer stating that it was unacceptable to go a week without a response. The message was a bit “short”, and it sounded like she was upset.

As soon as we realized we had let her down, we got right to resolving her issue and gave her some free service to make up for our mistake.

After I explained how the lack of an answer happened, she was very gracious; after we got her issue resolved she was very happy with our service.

We learned a valuable lesson about customers. They may seem difficult at times, but these are really laps in communication. With emails, there is no way to express emotion. What may seem like only a direct tone to the writer may be perceived as something more negative to the reader.

As with telephone conversions, when providing a service to the customer, we need not judge the customer, but listen to their complaint and get to what they really need.

This approach will bring the most “difficult” customer around to your side and lead them to a positive experience. The kind of experience that will bring them back again and again.

Situations that produce difficult customers happen because something has failed and the customer been inconvenienced. The customer arrives at our door or phone with a negative frame of mind. It’s what happens next that determines if they deal with us again or goes off to tell others about the experience they have had.

The trick is not just to fix the issues, but to let the customer know that you care about them and that you take responsibility for the mistake. Not every situation can be fixed, but it is how you tell the customer that you cannot fix it that is important.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently sent notices of inspection to a whopping 652 employers—warnings that investigators will descend on those workplaces to check I-9s and other hiring documents for all employees. ICE is seeking to ensure that each is authorized to work in the United States.

Audit your own records—and do it now.

One piece of good news is ICE’s change in emphasis away from workplace raids and toward (presumably better-controlled and less-aggressive) inspections focusing on documents rather than employees. But observers say that notices of inspection have gone out to more employers this year than in all of 2008. And, employers that escape criminal prosecution may still incur civil fines if ICE believes they knew some of their workers were unauthorized. A good initial preparation is to ensure you have all I-9s in one place, because if ICE conducts an inspection, you will have only 72 hours to round up each and every one of them for presentation at a local ICE office. Filing paper copies in the scattered locations where your employees work, therefore, could present a big problem.

A firm that helps employers verify new hires and maintain valid documents is HireRight.  We spoke with Darlene Baker, the firm’s liaison with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) E-Verify system, seeking more advice for employers.

Her first response was that HR should review every I-9 for completeness and accuracy. Each employee concerned should be contacted immediately to obtain missing information or new authorizations. These corrections can be made on the original form, so long as the HR manager initials all changes. But there’s one kind of error, Baker noted, that can’t be corrected: You must complete an I-9 within 3 days of a new hire’s joining your organization, so if it wasn’t done until 5 days after the person started, you can’t change it.

Should you use E-Verify?

Many experts note that confirming the match between new employees’ names and Social Security numbers is a prudent step to take in preparation for an ICE inspection, since that is the mode of verification endorsed by DHS. And, Baker reports that the majority of the firm’s large clients do use the system. Further, beginning September 8, 2009, all federal contractors and subcontractors are required to use it. But some immigration attorneys caution that the system is not for everyone: Enrolling can be cumbersome, and employees’ personal data become much more vulnerable. The databases involved are also subject to error at a rate, says Baker, ranging from 2.5 percent to 4 percent.

A better system has been proposed: Called the New Employee Verification Act, the bill is still in Congress and unlikely to be passed this year, but business favors it because (a) it would fund error corrections of the databases, and (b) it aligns with new-hire systems already in use in all 50 states.

Compliance tips. With ICE preparing to chase down work authorizations on thousands of employees across the country, the spotlight is on your new-hire documentation. Here are additional compliance tips from Baker and others:

• As we mentioned earlier, pull all your I-9s into a central location so they’ll be accessible quickly; don’t store them at distributed locations.
• Ensure you have an I-9 for every single employee.
• Consider purchasing an electronic system to track and manage I-9s. (For example, HireRight’s “I-9 Solution” will check each I-9 for completion and data matching. It also creates e-mail alerts for HR regarding authorization documents that are about to expire, and it generates management reports.)
• If you are in a high-enforcement industry such as agriculture or near-border hospitality, you’d be wise to adopt E-Verify, despite its potential drawbacks.
• In deciding whether to use E-Verify, assess the risks (of identity theft, for example) and of surprise visits and DHS data mining, as well as the administrative burden of participation.
• If you do use E-Verify, retain the system’s printout with the I-9 to which it’s related.
• Regardless of what systems you adopt, commit to periodic (at least annual) self-audits of I-9s and accompanying documentation. Find and correct mistakes before ICE does.
• Remember that as long as you can show a thorough, good-faith effort to be in compliance, ICE may well overlook a limited number of incorrectible errors—such as forms completed more than 3 days after employees began work. In the experience of Baker and some immigration lawyers, the agency “is usually reasonable and works with the company.”
• ICE has said that if you are inspected several times with good results, the agency may give you a 3-year moratorium on investigations.

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In October, President Obama signed into law the Fiscal Year 2010 National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 2647). The new law includes an expansion of the recently-enacted exigency and caregiver leave provisions for military families under the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA).

FMLA changes include:

Exigency leave – up to 12 weeks of leave for urgent needs related to a reservist family member’s (spouse, son, daughter, or parent) call to active service. H.R. 2647 expands the exigency leave benefits to include family members of active duty service members. Under current law, only family members of National Guard and Reservists are eligible for exigency leave.

Caregiver leave – up to 26 weeks of unpaid leave to an employee to care for a family member (spouse, son, daughter, parent, or next of kin) who is injured while serving on active military duty. H.R. 2647 expands the caregiver leave provision to include veterans who are undergoing medical treatment, recuperation or therapy for serious injury or illness that occurred any time during the five years preceding the date of treatment.

Dresser & Associates has been named the Top Sage Abra HMRS Business Partner in North America for the second year. In addition to this distinction, the company was also named to the Sage Chairman’s Club for the fourth year in a row. Chairman’s Club membership is earned by Sage Business Partners that develop an exceptional level of new business with Sage through defined sales and marketing programs, making these the top-selling Sage Business Partners in North America.

Mark Dresser, president of Dresser & Associates attributes the firm’s continuing success to its deep commitment to its clients. “Our customers recognize that the features and functions of an HRIS system are important, but what is most important is the business relationship with the company that supports their solution,” he said. “Our experience and expertise both with the software and with HR and payroll best practices allow us to share ideas and techniques our clients can use to leverage their software investment. We see our role as reaching beyond that of a software vendor; we hope our clients think of us as trusted business advisors sharing in their corporate missions.”

Mark Isenburg, vice president of workforce development and technical services at ABCD, a community development organization in Boston, and a client of Dresser & Associates, praised the company’s commitment to service. “Dresser & Associates impresses me. They are professional yet friendly – experts in the product and in general payroll practices,” he said. “A critical part of the success of our project was Dresser & Associates’ ability to quickly understand our needs and translate those needs into a solution.”

“The service we receive from Dresser is just outstanding. They approach a support issue with the attitude that my problem is their problem,” said Lisa Jones, controller at Eagle Rock Distributing, an Atlanta-based beverage distributor and also a client of Dresser & Associates.

Dresser & Associates continually invests in its own infrastructure to better serve its client base. The company’s Web site offers industry news and events, Sage Abra product tips, and online training. Frequent seminars and user groups cover topics of interest to clients and encourage collaboration. Most recently, the company helped form a LinkedIn Group, the Alliance for Workforce Management – Sage Abra HRMS, to better inform and educate the Sage Abra user community.

“Our organization is built on relationships, and Dresser & Associates fits right in to that model,” added Isenburg. “It is apparent that they consider their role to be helping us make our organization function better. I consider this a long-term partnership.”